


an extremely uneventful subject

by attack of the killer himbos (melodramatic_fratboi)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bisexual Dean Winchester, Child Abuse, Domestic Bliss, Eventual Happy Ending, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pansexual Castiel (Supernatural), Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Slow Burn, Therapy, canon compliant only if you're a coward, dean's gonna have so many fucking pets in this fic, no beta we die like my respect for Andrew Dabb
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-24 07:34:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30068835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melodramatic_fratboi/pseuds/attack%20of%20the%20killer%20himbos
Summary: This is a collection of Dean Winchester's memories.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	1. November, 1983

**Author's Note:**

> asjskjimusuysk dear god this was supposed to be a one shot idk what it is evolving into now
> 
> [the title is from no choir by florence + the machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AexrAvyJjJY)

The boy, so young, so heartbreakingly young, sat in the back of an ambulance with a shock blanket draped over him, the bundle of his infant brother held in his arms, close to his chest. Mrs. Schubert, who lived next door and always let him play with her kitten, stood next to him, a gentle hand resting on his knee. A few feet away, his father spoke to one of the firefighters, the frantic words drowned out by the smell of smoke that billowed from his home, a plume of grey that marred the ink of the night sky. 

Paramedics had looked them over, him, his brother and their father, and they had been mostly, physically, unharmed, just some minor smoke inhalation and a sprinkling of singes, nothing that would not heal within a week or so.

Fire was his mother’s shroud. In the end, in his many ends, it would also be his.

For his third birthday, the boy had received a Tonka fire truck, bright red with an adjustable ladder that he had rarely ever played with. 

A real one was on his curb right now, gigantic and somehow, less red than his plastic one and louder than he could have ever imagined. In fact, more than the heat, more than the acrid stench, it was the noise that the boy would remember, the crackle of the fire as it ate through wood, the booming crash of glass windows as they blew out, the sound of his father’s voice, terrified and commanding to him get out, to get away, his brother crying against his neck, too small to know what was happening but understanding the wrongness of it all nonetheless, the clamour of his neighbours who had come out and gathered to behold the tragedy that would become a story they told years later, of the house that had seen such devastation, that no one could live in for very long, that had become tainted and haunted forever by the ravaged remains of the American dream.

And then, came the sirens. The fire engine first, followed by the ambulance and the police cars, the high pitched, howling wails like a cacophony of banshees mourning a loss that had been predetermined even before the boy’s birth, raising alarm and warning after the damage had already been done.

The water they used to try and douse the fire came out in a gushing roar, hitting the walls of the house with rasping thuds, like torrential rain that had been localised on a single spot. It dripped down into puddles on the lawn, keeping the flames from spreading but inside, they burned on until their job was done leaving behind no trace of how or why the incineration had started.

The harsh, shrill lamentation of a life burning away would become his white noise, constant and consuming, anchored in the sea of his memories like a ship with a breached hull that refused to drown.

The house, previously pale and pristine, was now bruised with black, wounded by the blaze that the authorities would never be able to attribute a cause to. The windows of his brother’s nursery were gone, the frame charred and warped. On the floor of that room lay the corpse that had once been his mother, in a bed of ashes and embers, yet to be retrieved. All that remained of her, after her nightgown, her hair, her skin and muscle and fat and sinew had fused and disintegrated, after her internal organs had cooked and her bones had splintered and shrunk, all that remained was the mangled, scorched body of a person that had been, alive and unaware, a mere handful of hours ago and now was no longer.

The flames had stopped raging but the boy knew that they would never live in that house again.

As an adult, looking back, the hunter would reflect upon what he had been thinking about in that moment, his toddler brain trying to process a trauma he would not even begin to understand until he was older, harder, worn out and altogether more fragile than he had been at the age of four.

The midnight dew had soaked into his socks, made the bottoms of his flannel pyjamas damp. The air around the house was warm, like a great bonfire that could keep the neighborhood cosy in the cold of December. It barely even looked like night time, lit as his surroundings were by orange, by red and blue, and later, by vile, greedy yellow. The unnatural glow of anguish, the feverish swelter of gluttonous desire for power, the reeking, fetid stink of an existence sworn to revenge made his world plunge into an unrecognisable mass of freezing cold anger and hatred.

The boy shivered.

The wool wrapped form of his brother wriggled, quiet now but sleepless. The boy looked into the baby’s large green eyes, the same colour as his own. His brother’s face was flushed, stained with dried tears. He did not seem upset or confused as he had at first, only awake and uncomprehending of the incident that had unfolded around him. He babbled a few bored words at the boy, patting the boy’s chin with tiny, chubby fingers, demanding a response.

The boy wished he could say something, he wanted to say something but his voice seemed to have lost its way along his chest, wandered into the pit of his stomach and settled there, making his insides twist and churn. 

He shrugged off the shock blanket, suddenly too heavy for his shoulders.

“Oh, honey, don’t look,” Mrs. Schubert said, with a broken gasp, flinging her arms around him and his brother, crushing her cheek against his hair so that her body was in the way of his eyesight as the firefighters came out of the house, carrying a stretcher with a dark shape atop it. But they were too far away for the boy to discern what it was, what little he could see over the crook of her elbow. 

In front of the stretcher that had been placed down, by the porch, their father knelt on the grass, hunched over, shoulders shaking. Mr. Schubert hovered by him, blocking the rest of the boy’s view. In some distant part of his mind the boy wanted to go to them and see what was happening but he stayed where he was, limbs stuck and uncooperative, with his hand cradling the back of his brother’s head, like his mother had taught him to.

“I’m so, so, sorry, baby,” Mrs. Schubert was whispering, crying above him, her words muffled and ruptured by sobs. She kept apologising over and over again, for a thing that was and would never be her fault and the boy absentmindedly rubbed her forearm, trying to comfort her but not really grasping the meaning of the litany of sorries that were being spoken against his forehead.

His brother shifted, humming, leaning into the warmth he was now cushioned between. 

The boy tried his best to think, to feel, to understand but all the words he had learnt were going away, fading, taking with them the noise that had been clanging in his ears, the hot and the cold that had been fighting to encompass him all night long, the blur of emergency responders, in their uniforms, of neighbours in the night clothes, the house, his home, the face of his mother tucking him in bed, the pungent, heady, stinging stench of burnt wood, the bitterness of soot and interrupted sleep on his tongue until he was unseeing, unhearing, until no smell, no taste, no sensation remained. His mind was quiet, his thoughts vanishing into nothingness, blank and clean for the last time in his life.

When he could think again, sitting on the hood of the Impala, the side of his face pressed to the scratchy fabric of his father’s housecoat, he wondered if his toys had melted in the heat. He wished he could have rescued his stuffed dinosaur at least.


	2. Therapy Interlude #1: A Good Week

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> these interludes weren't supposed to happen until later but then i started rewatching the show and fuck it, i'm sending his dumb ass to so much therapy

_ May, 2017 _

“Hey, Nadia,” Dean greets as he sits down on the red suede couch, stretching his denim clad legs out in front of himself.

“Hello, Dean,” Nadia Ahmed, his therapist, says from the matching couch opposite him. She is wearing flowing grey trousers and a sleeveless, printed blue shirt, her short, black hair falling in a disarray of curls about her face. “How are you doing?”

“I- I don’t know,” He states, sagging further back in his seat, running his palms along the armrests, the suede soft beneath his skin.

“You don’t know?” Nadia repeats. A closed leather bound journal and a pen rest on the end table beside her that used to make Dean nervous during his initial few weeks. He chose to ignore it now, even though a part of him still wondered what she wrote down about him in it.

He shakes his head. “Nope. It’s just- it’s been a very nothing week.” 

Nadia picks up the notebook, opens it a fresh page and places it in her lap. “Tell me about what you did during the week, then.”

The office has pale yellow walls and seaweed green curtains. There is a neatly organised dark, wooden desk to their right, positioned in front of an open window. There is another window to their left, with three plants underneath it. Dean leans towards it. “Well, we didn’t have a case this week so I mostly stayed at home and did like, normal stuff, I guess.”

“Can you give me some details?”

“Uh, so,” He starts, trying to recollect a more or less linear sequence of events that had taken place over the last seven days. “Jo came over for the weekend so I got to chill with her, lazed around with Cas and Sammy, took Mercury out for her walks, did some of my pending chores around the house. Just like, nothing special” 

Nadia crosses her legs, rests an elbow on the armrest. “Sounds like you had a busy week, then.” She comments. “Why’d you call it nothing?”

“Because nothing went wrong, I guess.” He alleges, picking at a loose thread on his jeans.

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

Dean darts a glimpse towards her face, green eyes meeting hazel ones for a split second before he looks away, focuses on a point behind her shoulder. “Sure- uh, it was okay, I suppose.”

“Just okay?”

He fidgets, closes his eyes, tipping his head back so that he is half lying on the couch. “Look, it’s dumb but I don’t want to say it outloud.” He says, opening his eyes so that he can frown at the ceiling. 

“Say what?” Nadia asks, scratching something down in her notebook.

“Take a guess.”

“How about you give me a hint?”

“Well, uh, with like, Cas right?” Dean says, sitting up, settling the heel of one boot on the bottom beam of the coffee table between them, kicking at the edge of the khaki and orange carpet with the toe of the other. “It was Tuesday afternoon and we didn’t have anything to do so he asked me if I wanted to turn on the TV and just make out in bed with him. And like, of course I’m not gonna say no to that, I’m not  _ that  _ dead inside. So I chose the X-Files because Cas can’t stand David Duchovny and he wouldn’t care much for it,” He pauses, smiles at the image of Cas hurling insults at the screen every time Agent Mulder was on it. “But then he ended up getting into it anyway and we finished watching the first season throughout the rest of the week.”

“So you didn’t get much making out done, then?” Nadia jokes, returning Dean’s smile.

“No, we did, we had to pause halfway through the third episode to get it all out of the way but yeah, y’know.” He chuckles, crosses one foot over the other. “And then, Jo, she was there till Monday morning and she kicked my ass at Monopoly, we made pretzels together and she snuck basically fifty percent of her dinner to Mercury. Sam wasn't being a health nut this week either and ate, like, a whole large pizza by himself which didn’t even have a single vegetable on it, so well there you go, there’s your hint.” He inhales deeply, flopping back into his sprawl.

Nadia leans forward, propping her chin up on the back of her hand. “Are you trying to tell me you had a good week?”

“Shh, don’t jinx it.” He gestures wildly with one hand, as if to shut her up and gesticulate her words away.

“You’re afraid this won’t happen again if you talk about it?” She raises a brow at him.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Dean lifts himself up from his slouch, bending his legs, clasping and unclasping his hands in his lap. “Well, I don’t know. Something’s gonna go horribly wrong, I’m gonna piss the universe off or the stars won’t align. I don’t understand how or why the powers that be allowed this and now it’s like, what if it wasn’t real, what if it was a fucking fluke?” His words run on, coming out in a rush as he frets.

“Because this has never happened before?”

“No,” He shakes his head, glancing down at the hardwood floor. His mind, warring as it often does, gives him a quick flash of lounging on the couch at home with Cas as they watched Some Like It Hot with Sam and Jo, when his only thought had been that he would not get to keep it, that it must have been some sort of cosmic mistake, that he would wake up the next day and fall into one of his unending depressive slumps. “Because, it never lasted when it did happen, which was rare as it is.” 

“So, you want this to last, then?”

“I mean, yeah. What the fuck?” Dean looks at her like she’s sprouted a second and a third head and maybe an extra set of limbs. “Isn’t that the whole point of therapy?’ He adds, incredulously.

“Do you remember when you told me you were terrified that the shitty parts would never stop and that you’d never be really happy?” She asks, her voice even, calm.

He nods. It is a fear he lives with, has learned to hold in his heart because it never seems to leave.

“Would you say you were happy this week?”

“I- not exactly, because I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but sure, it had its moments.”

He had not woken up and fallen into a depressive slump. Instead, he had made spinach and cheddar crepes with Sam and Mercury while Cas had napped on the kitchen counter.

“Well then, can we agree that you had a not bad week?” Nadia tilts her head to the side, making some more notes about their session. “Is that safer?’ She holds his gaze.

Dean shrugs.

“I know you’re worried that something out of your control will intervene and mess things up for you, that you’ll lose this nascent joy you’ve found but I want you to consider something- everything you did this week, that made you feel good, was  _ in  _ your control,” Her tone is soft, professional.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you chose to do these activities, yes? You chose to watch the X-Files with Castiel, you chose to hang out and bake with Jo, you chose to have dinner with Sam. And you did all these things when you could have just stayed in your room and isolated yourself” She explains, with an encouraging, warm expression on her face.

Dean chews on the inside of his cheek, contemplating. “I didn’t want to isolate myself,” He reveals finally.

Nadia smiles, one tinged with pride, a smile he is slowly becoming more familiar with. “The Dean I met a year and a half ago would not have said that. Think about that, okay?”

“You’re being gross,” He puffs out an embarrassed breath, cheeks turning red as he tries to tamp down glitter of elation trying to bud within him. 

“You’ll have to start admitting that you’re starting to make progress at some point.” Her eyes are still light but Dean knows her therapist voice TM well enough, which makes everything sound like an attack even though, at this moment, it is more of a gentle nudge. 

“I’m leaving now,” He states, getting up from the couch with the mildest bout of panicked excitement building in his chest.

“Bye Dean,” She says, heading towards her desk. “I’ll see you next Friday, at 4?”

“Yeah. Have a good week”

“Ah, don’t jinx it for me,” Nadia quips, a corner of her mouth quirking up into a teasing grin.

“Can’t believe I pay you to bully me,” Dean laughs, rolling his eyes as he shuts the door behind himself.

Dean stops along the way to Marmalade —the hipster cafe that Cas had come to love and lived in for a few hours every week while Dean was at therapy— to buy flowers, as has become their custom, vibrantly yellow sunflowers and pale pink yarrow, today.

“Hey, Dean!” Akari, the cashier, says as he walks into the cafe, waving. “How are you?”

“I’m alright,” Dean replies, returning the gesture with a smile and wave of his own. “You?”

“Eh, same old,” They shrug. “Castiel’s in the reading nook today. Your food will be out in a minute.”

“Cool, thanks!”

“Have fun! I like the flowers!” 

Dean gives them another grin, and goes to find his boyfriend, weaving his way through the crowded tables to the reading nook, which is sectioned off from the main room.

Cas sits cross legged at one of the two bay windows in the room, in a well worn Ramones t-shirt and purple pants with glitter skulls on them, Dean’s beat up copy of the Neuromancer in his hand, shoes discarded under the table, an empty coffee mug on top of it. 

The other tables in the room are also occupied, by people working, reading and talking in hushed voices. A few of them look up as Dean enters, two giving him entirely unsubtle once overs.

Cas snorts and Dean smirks at him, cocky, playful. 

“Hi, darling,” He says, leaning up to receive the quick, warm kiss Dean presses to his lips.

“Got you these,” Dean hands the bouquet to him, taking the seat Cas leaves vacant as he shifts to the left. “Akari said the food will be here soon.”

Cas shuts his book, using, unlike Dean who uses whatever he finds near him, an actual bookmark, a Coraline one Charlie had given him after he had gotten extremely into Laika and stop motion movies over the winter, to mark his place. 

“Thank you, Dean. Ordered a cinnamon cold brew and the pesto chicken sandwich for you, by the way, ” He mentions, as he takes the flowers, keeping them on the table alongside the Neuromancer. He wraps a hand around Dean’s wrist. “How was therapy, baby?”

Dean droops sideways, bumping his forehead against Cas’ shoulder. “She tricked me into admitting I had a good week,” He whines.

An arm wraps around him, a nose nuzzling his hair. “Uh-oh,” Cas says, a smile audible in his tone.

Viola arrives with their food, placing Dean’s in front of him and a chocolate chip brownie in front of Cas.

Dean straightens up to say hi to her, laying a hand on Cas’ thigh. “Thanks, Vi. How’s school?”

“I hate it more everyday,” She responds brightly, making Cas chuckle. “I have a truly disgusting essay on Foucault due on Friday that I’m procrastinating on but I’ll get to see Zuri on Saturday so it’s not all bad.” She smiles, tucking a hand into the pocket of her apron.

“You finally asked her out?” Dean asks, eyes lighting up.

“Had to get a little tipsy but yeah, I did it,” Viola nods, blushing.

“And it only took you all of freshman and sophomore year,” Dean teases.

“Hey!” Viola begins to protest, mouth dropping open in surprise.

Cas squeezes Dean’s waist. “Glass houses, Dean. You took seven years before you told me you had feelings for me,” He states, patronizing, lighthearted.

Dean shoots him a jovial glare. “Don’t listen to him, Vi. He’s lying.” He squeezes Cas’ knee in retaliation.

“I’m going to believe him,” Viola laughs, scrunching up her nose at the betrayed look Dean directs her way. “Have a great date, you guys,” She adds as she turns to leave.

“Hope you have a good one on Saturday as well!” Cas calls out, for which he receives a flushed smile.

“Can’t believe you exposed me to her like that,” Dean grumbles, cutting into the brownie with his fork.

“It’s a part of the job description,” Cas grins, smug, blue eyes soft and affectionate.

Dean savours a bite of the fudgy, chocolate treat while Cas lets go of his side to twine their hands together, resting them on his leg. “I forgot to tell Nadia you have the hots for Scully now,” He says once he finishes his mouthful.

“It’s a sign of my superior taste.”

Dean rolls his eyes, grinning, and takes a sip of his coffee. He leans his head back down on Cas’ shoulder, breathing in the aroma of the cafe mingling with the scent of his boyfriend, cherry blossom perfume and clean cotton. “It’s weird that I don’t hate being alive right now,” He murmurs quietly.

“Careful, darling,” Cas says, voice tender and so very full of love, of delight, of hope. “You’re gonna lose your angsty bisexual cred.”

Dean breathes out a half-laugh and feels a kiss be brushed against his hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (did i make dean a super fidgety restless bitch bc that's i'm like? i guess we'll never know)


End file.
